


Certain as the Sun

by CloveeD



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beauty and the Beast Elements, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Lawyer Peter, Little Shit Stiles, M/M, Recovery, Short Chapters, Slow Burn, Trauma, but not like that, some stock pictures are used
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-30
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-24 01:45:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4900777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloveeD/pseuds/CloveeD
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter's eyes were just suddenly glowing red one morning, still in New York state having just traveled to another city for a case. From states away he was rendered psychologically comatose inside his hotel bathroom, just falling over halfway through shaving in front of the mirror, and crashing into the tub in his bathroom robe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shades

**Author's Note:**

> I've been fiddling with this idea for more than half a year now, majority of time spent avoiding it, hmmmmm... Certain logistic details like how Peter keeps his pack bond while being away from the pack will be explained later on. The stock images used in this fic do not belong to me.

  

Peter Hale walked out on his last argument with Talia Hale on a dry, summer day under the Californian sun.  
  
It wasn't a very heated argument - as in, when Peter turned his back on his alpha, no claws ripped him a new one for announcing his undetermined leave of absence from pack duties for a better life across the country. Blistering stares of disappointment and frustration followed Peter out the front door.  
  
Peter put on his shades, the ones that he knew Derek secretly vowed to get when Derek would be old enough to pull them off and look cool in. Peter moved out of state, made a home up in New York, finished his degree in law, and gave everyone in the graduation ceremony an excellent view of his ass walking off stage after making the Valedictorian speech. 

  

Peter carved himself a place in his far-away city, wearing the skin of a cut-throat lawyer, shouldering his black sheep status with his family pack proudly. He kept basic tabs on the pack back in Beacon Hills, and manages the weakest of weak Beta status like an anomaly. When Peter came back, contacted as what appeared to be the last known Hale kin, Peter slipped his hands inside his Brioni suit slacks without a sound, lips and brows perfectly composed, claws digging his palms bloody.  
  
Peter's eyes were just suddenly glowing red one morning, still in New York state having just traveled to another city for a case. From states away he was rendered psychologically comatose inside his hotel bathroom, just falling over halfway through shaving in front of the mirror, and crashing into the tub in his bathroom robe. He remained there comatose for four days before the maid, braving the Do Not Disturb sign, found him and screamed.

 

  
Beneath Peter's boots now were the ashes of the Hale house and the Hale pack.  
  
The ground crunched as the inspector explained in a faux-calm and meekly professional voice what they believed to have happened. Peter's glowing red gaze turned to the crunch of the inspector's boots, and the man froze mid-step, skin clammy as a full moment passed aggravatingly slowly between Peter Hale and the inspector. It looked like the inspector was wondering if he was about to see his scuffing father in hell. Peter let the inspector go for now, in the way a cat would allow a mouse to fatten up a little more before taking it in one great swallow.  
  
The Hales----the pack----Peter's sisters and brother, nieces and nephews, in-laws, children----were all burned into the ground, in what had to be a clearly premeditated murder, mountain ashed and wolfsbane-doped, an arson that burned long and hard enough to render werewolves with super healing into corpses.  
  
Peter would be back about the inspector, and he would take care of things the way they should be taken care of.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very short chapters, but having already written a good chunk of the fic, more will come.


	2. Dig

 

 

 

Peter slaughtered them with the iron fist of law plus a little bone-crushing manhandling. They were humans. It wasn't hard.

  

Peter savoured the satisfying moment of victory while watching the humans involved get taken into custody, and the female hunter sent to hospital before being sent to the death row. It's a slow process for the human to stabilize, be processed through the death sentence, and lay in their cells in wait, but Kate Argent's legs were 'crushed by accidental falling' while running from the police. Peter was not worried she would make it out of prison, much less before the time of her death sentence. Humans were fragile like that.

Satisfaction was a fleeting sensation. 

  

Peter would be less surprised if he'd had more sleep since turning alpha. Sleep was scarce nowadays, both due to the feral flood coursing through his veins, and the utter lack of pack where there should be. Peter had lived for years without pack in his vicinity - this should not have been that hard. 

Peter stayed in a hotel penthouse while he paged through documents in the aftermath. Death certificates. Autopsy reports. Will. Property documents. Bills. Taxes. Insurance. House, vehicles, and lives. 11 sets of papers for 11 lives, too much to close, too little to be enough. The documents spread across Peter's hotel bed in docile tones of blue, pink, white, and printed words. Peter realized belatedly that he didn't have any printed photographs to put up for their funerals. 

  

The funeral homes were wise to not pick now to promote their services to Peter. Peter looked at the remnants of what used to be the extended house that held no bodies left to bury, and thought, no, they're burned. 

No one was allowed to pay their respects as Peter picked up a shovel from the hardware store, and dug graves for his estranged family. He felt it now, now that he sought for it, the pack bond that had stayed weak and connected by sheer force of will to keep despite the distance - it was completely absent now. Comatose had been but a glance at how the sudden absence felt. 

Peter's wolf howled, Peter silently dug holes in the ground and buried ashes. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's just say this is before the year (2014) when California ruled capital punishment out. Again, short short short chapters.


	3. Stump

 

 

Building a house from the ground up after reworking the soil was nothing Peter knew anything about.

 

He spent a week reading, talking with workers down south. Peter leveled the ground, rented a bulldozer, and a truck. Peter laid the foundation, poured in cement, losing his temper countless times, losing his finger to a circular saw only once. 

  

Having strangers come and touch what was supposed to be the pack home - that would have been perceived as _danger_ . _Foreign. Potential threat_. Peter refused the idea of hiring workers, even werewolves from nearby packs. Peter rolled up his own button-up sleeves, and went about it himself. The logical part of Peter knew well enough that it was a stupid idea. It was a rude underestimation of a profession he knew nothing about, and likely too paranoid even to the eyes of other supernaturals. This house was going to look like a crooked yard shed by the time he was done, because he didn't know what he was doing, not at all. But Peter'd been away from the pack, independent; while the pack burned to their ends, Peter was speeding Ferrari and playing with people's lives wearing a striped suit.

Peter was alone. Peter had to be the one to rebuild the house.

 

It took Peter another week to lay the foundation right. A rainstorm ruined his cement once. Peter stayed silent ordering another shipment and bulldozing the ruined cement into pieces before transferring them to the truck. Doing everything by himself was draining. Even the hardware and truck companies were beginning to recognize Peter's name repeatedly showing up on order forms. 

Late September, the Hale house had a stone-laid shell and passable structure. 

By this time, Peter had shed his button-ups and leather shoes, and learned to wear jeans and boots and worker gloves. He hadn't shaved for nearly a month now. Hotel left unoccupied, mirrors unchecked. He must look terrible. 

 

Some nights, Peter dreamed of a large, heavy stump in the woods, gnarly roots, width wide enough to bed a full grown man. Peter would open his eyes in this dream, lying across the stump with his limbs outstretched, feeling moss beneath his nape and blinding hatred beneath his eyelids. He was more angry in his dreams than when awake. Peter would open his eyes in these dreams, realize he was back on this wretched stump again, turn onto his knees, and pound at the stump with his fists like a child throwing a tantrum. 

 

He was angry.

He was _angry_.

He was **_angry_**.

 

Peter pounded away at the woody material, and the stump remained unmoving, unharmed. Peter could break a tree trunk by hand if he worked at it, but he couldn't put a dent in this tree stump. This enraged Peter for a while, and then he was tired, even in his own dream. Two months into these same dreams, Peter started sleeping even in his dream, instead, like a passive rebellion of the quietest kind. 

The sleep within a dream didn't give Peter any rest, nor did the damned stump react any differently. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all kindly for the support!


	4. Air

 

 

  

The house was rebuilt, and Peter didn't know how to operate a Dyson DC40 Origin Vacuum. 

The maids used to take care of all that back in New York, and right now, Peter was not about to allow any non-pack ---- anyone but Peter, now --- to have access to their rebuilt den. It didn't quite compute for Peter at this point why the Dyson DC40 was so difficult to wield, or why, after a mere 20 minutes of trying to vacuum his own floors, Peter was doubled over and then curled up on the still mildly moist Hickory wooden floor, having what appeared to be a panic attack. 

Breathing out was even harder than breathing in, and there was this invisible, heavy grip crushing his chest and the air was just not doing what it was supposed to in or outside of Peter's lungs. Somewhere at the back of Peter's mind, he was up in arms about whether or not this was another attack, an attack on the den, on his nonexistent pack, if this was _wolfsbane, mistletoe, Mountain Ash_ , any of those things that werewolves were surprisingly vulnerable to. His senses were useless right now, his mind was useless right now. 

He couldn't protect his pack. He couldn't even breath right.

  

It was hard to make heads or tails of anything when he couldn't hold his own, because he was utterly alone. This was why wolves needed to be in packs. 

The Dyson DC40 was thereby abandoned for a day, three days, and then three weeks. Just a circle of hand-polished Hickory wood floor around the toppled over vacuum, with the Dyson DC40 left strewn across that circle of relatively cleaner floor, an bottle of wood polish and rags tossed beside the vacuum, the polish having spilled out since day one, forming a dried puddle of chemicals on Peter's wooden floor. 

Peter worked his way around it. Peter relocated the flatscreen from across to adjacent, and shifted the leather sofa so he wouldn't have to look at the heap of Dyson DC40 and polish flake mess he'd left in the center of his living room. Peter was suddenly exhausted, and slept at least 14 hours a day, most of the time woken up only by ridiculous song birds outside the windows at 5AM. One day he was going to spring out of that window and crush that songbird's windpipe. Just not today.

  

But for the most part, Peter was simply sleeping, working remotely on his laptop for a couple of hours a day, getting his meals in in between work time on his laptop. He left instructions before he came back to go on a Consultant mode more than lawyer, and the firm he worked under had known him long enough to trust him to get said work done - it would only be a matter of time before they'd start to realize that Peter was starting to really slow down on his work pace. 

He slept more often on the sofa than on his own bed - a king-sized thing he assembled himself, complete with Egyptian cotton sheets and velvet canopy curtains. 

He'd picked out the color schemes himself, meticulously ordered sets online and had them delivered, returned, and rebought. Peter learned from crafting sites how to hem the drapes so they hung at just the right length, and Peter followed all the instructions on the manual of how to glaze the wooden floor panels so it looked just like the one they got back for Dennis when she was 8. 

A bow wrapped, palm-sized box for her birthday in November stayed unsent and left abandoned in his apartment in New York. Peter didn't know if he could go back.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing against Dyson DC40 Origin Vacuum! Just a random expansive equipment I picked. Next chapter, others begin to show up!


	5. In

 

 

 

A month into Peter's long-standing cold war with his Dyson DC40, someone broke into Peter's house. 

Peter knew of the rumors (when Peter cared to anyway, he only ever went out into town for supply runs nowadays). The outside of the rebuilt Hale house was now dark charcoal grey stone, nothing like their original flora-dotted, painted wood-lined house that could have easily been a picture taken straight out of House and Homes magazine. 

Peter knew what the townspeople were saying about his rebuilt Hale house. That it looked like Dracula set up shop in the suburban green belt woods. It looked like a haunted manor, a stone palace in the depth of the woodland. And it was October. Of course, it sounded like a perfect set-up for stupid teenage children to prove their own stupidity by testing the Dracula castle challenge out. 

  

They circle the house like curious little rats at first, cellphone lights in hand at times, excited and nervous whispers rushed between their wind-chilled cheeks. By the evening hours, Peter was most often already sleeping his 14 hours away, all the lights were off, no movements in the stone manor. Peter woke up at the first heartbeat of a teenager that wondered into vicinity just outside the house window. The heartbeat ran fast, nervous child. Ignore them, Peter thought, maybe they would go away. 

And then, Peter jumped up and rolled out of bed at the sound of a stone breaking through his ground floor window, and then followed by children's nasty giggly laughter, cheering each other on. They knew nothing, most likely. Some town folks knew what the Hale house rebuilt was all about, others only knew that there was a mysteriously elusive hermit living in the Preserve on Hale land nowadays. Children----they only knew what they were interested in knowing at that moment, and at that moment, Halloween was all the rage. That stone manor inside the dark, dark woods - it probably was a haunted house, Jimmy! Don't be such a wimp, prove that you aren't, Jimmy.  

The next morning Peter went into town and bought replacements, spent his morning fixing the window, and eyed the new window with some exhaustion. Maybe if he stayed quiet long enough, the children would go away. 

  

The  next two nights passed quietly, though Peter couldn't sleep very well, wondering if they were going to show up again. Just went Peter began to think perhaps it had been an one-off thing, the heartbeats were back, this time different ones, there was a girl, and Peter's backdoor door handle rattled. Peter sat up in alarm. 

These were merely children.

Peter's heart pounded and squeezed like his pack den was under attack. 

  

Never before did Peter feel such need for the existence of pack. When he'd been the black sheep of the family, he had the gusto to butt heads with his alpha sister and turn his nose up as he moved across the country like it was a successful revolution against their outraged and disappointed stares. He only felt this need when they were no longer there to forgive him. Peter shook, from the core of his being, for the first time realizing that he was truly, utterly alone when under attack. Under attack. 

 Peter bared fangs, shifted into his wolf pelt and snarled at the heartbeats outside, the giggly sounds of children as loud as fire crackles in his mind. The children screamed at the sound, someone cried "Mountain lion!" and they ran, just as Peter scrambled to hide underneath his bed.

Every invasion, Peter had to control that panic first before handling the breach. Peter was a survivor. He would handle the breach to his pack den even when the awareness of loss of pack left his fingers and feet cold and clammy. He would kill them. He would kill them. He would take care of the breach. 

  

The first break-in, Peter had been on one of his 48 hour sleeping days after a handful of sleepless nights, and all the lights in the house had been off again. The intruders this time, Peter half-woke to hear, two pairs of little feet pitter-pattering into Peter's pack den. Flashlights flashed around, heartbeats nervous, and one of them snickering like assholes that children were. Peter slunk into the darkness, making no sound as he slipped out of bed and into his wolf pelt, silently creeping out of his room. 

.... The flashlight swept across the dining room's crystal collection and glass and wood cabinets a final time, and Peter's glowing red eyes flashed back at the boys. The boys screamed, just as Peter let out a low rumble, the sound loud enough and low enough to vibrate the silverwear in the cabinets. 

 

The boys fled like rabbits. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Others are here, though I realized that Stiles is only mentioned indirectly in this chapter now that I've read the chapter through, oops...


End file.
